How can they even think over the deafening dissonance in their heads? In order to prevent people from being distracted with same-sex marriage in New York, NOM is pledging $500K to make it the #1 issue in the 2010 Republican primaries, because they're not as well-funded as Teh gayz:

With same-sex marriage still hanging in the balance in a paralyzed New York State Senate, the anti-marriage National Organization for Marriage is promising to spend $500,000 underwriting a primary campaign against any Republican who votes for gay marriage.

Gay rights groups are lobbying Republican senators hard on the vote, as a handful would need to switch sides to pass the measure.

"Gay marriage is not high on the list of any voters' priorities, but again and again we've seen politicians respond to political money thrown around by Tim Gill and his friends and ignore the wishes of their own constituents," said Brian Brown, executive director of the anti-same-sex-marriage organization, who said the group is forming a subsidiary, NOM PAC New York, for the purpose.

"Not high on the list of any voters' priorities," said the man who's pledging millions to promote his side of the issue.

They completely have a right to do that, and the left should be primarying Democrats more often. And not just on marriage, but on the war, the bailouts, health care (we know we'll get there), torture....

It may be effective to get Republicans not to stray. The groups says they've raised $6 million since 2007, so if a block of Republicans votes for marriage they'd be powerless to follow-through on this threat. But it's unlikely many would, maybe just one or two, so it keeps it cheap enough to do for NOM.

Who this doesn't help is the Republican Party. Suppose one of these folks gets successfully primaried in 2010 and replaced with an extreme-right Republican. That doesn't help them out in the general election.

But this dynamic is one we're seeing on a national level on issues: the Republicans are completely out of touch with mainstream America, but the base has such a stranglehold on the party that they can't follow the country to the left.

At the same time, the Democrats are doing nothing to give the Republicans space to move to the left or to help the public make a clear distinction between the two parties. The country is generally to the left of the Democratic Party, and the more that Republicans feel they can't stray from the party line to help out their actual consituencies and districts, the more they lose.

It's all too much, but I don't actually think it's a good thing for the New York GOP to start taking orders from a homophobic group as ridiculous as NOM. But they just might do it. We'll see the results of what's been going on in NYS politics in two years.

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